A Message from Dean
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Dr. Kogure Kentaro |
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Thank you for visiting the website of the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences of Tokushima University. On this page, I would like to briefly introduce the human resources, education, and research that our faculty. The Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences of Tokushima University celebrated its 100th anniversary in November 2024. Dr. Nagayoshi Nagai, who was born in Tokushima and is the founder of Japanese pharmaceutical science, advised in his later years to establish the Department of Applied Chemistry (the predecessor of the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences) at Tokushima Higher Technical School in 1922, and for 100 years since then, it has been the only pharmaceutical school with engineering roots in Japan.
Since 2021, the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences of Tokushima University has been aiming to nurture research-based pharmaceutical scientists and pharmacists by offering a six-year course of study in Pharmaceutical Sciences. The human resources that our faculty aims to nurture are the Interactive YAKUGAKUJIN. The Interactive YAKUGAKUJIN is “a person who has acquired a wide range of knowledge and skills based on various fields of pharmaceutical sciences, has a high sense of ethics to interact with various professional fields of pharmaceutical sciences and society, and can actively explore opportunities to be active on his/her own. We believe that the foundation of this human resource development is education through research in drug discovery and manipulation (creating and manipulating drugs). For this reason, we have established courses that enable students to cultivate a research mindset through exposure to cutting-edge research at a very early stage, such as the “Research Experience Exercise,” in which students experience specialized research at a laboratory of their choice in their first year immediately after enrollment, and the Active Research Project in their second year, which allows students to engage in deeper and more intensive research. We also offer distinctive courses such as Core DDS Lectures and Practical Dojo for Drug Discovery based on the specialized research areas of the faculty members (/ph/admission/applicants/22608.html). In this way, the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences at Tokushima University is committed to fostering the Interactive YAKUGAKUJIN through a unique curriculum that is unprecedented in Japan.
Since 2024, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) has been promoting the “enhancement of drug discovery capabilities”. We take this to mean that while the focus of pharmaceutical education has been on fostering pharmacists, it should also focus on fostering a research mindset and improving research capabilities. As mentioned earlier, the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences at Tokushima University aims to nurture the Interactive YAKUGAKUJIN through education based on drug discovery and drug manipulation research, and we are already practicing education that leads to “improvement of drug discovery capabilities. However, in order to enhance education through research, it is also necessary to improve and develop the research capabilities of our faculty members. To this end, we will promote more than ever before, for example, the acquisition of large competitive funds and interdisciplinary joint research not only within the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences but also with other departments and universities. By doing so, we aim to produce the Interactive YAKUGAKUJIN who can actively collaborate with each other in various fields by focusing on fostering human resources who will be responsible for drug discovery and manipulation in Japan in the future.
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